Mario Monicelli obituary

Here’s the excellent obituary for Mario Monicelli from The Guardian, written by John Francis Lane:

The Italian film director Mario Monicelli has died aged 95, after jumping out of a hospital window in Rome. Monicelli directed more than 60 films, most of which he co-wrote. He was best known for I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal On Madonna Street, 1958), which was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language film. It was remade by Louis Malle as Crackers (1984) and turned into a Broadway musical, Big Deal, by Bob Fosse in 1986. Monicelli’s original is one of the most internationally admired Italian comedies of the past 60 years.

Born in Viareggio, Tuscany, Monicelli was the son of a journalist, Tomaso Monicelli, who founded one of the earliest Italian film magazines. Tomaso killed himself in 1946. Mario studied at the universities of Milan and Pisa and took an early interest in films. With the future publisher Alberto Mondadori, he collaborated on the 16mm feature I Ragazzi della Via Paal (The Paul Street Boys, 1935), based on a novel by Ferenc Molnár. It won a prize at the Venice film festival and led to Monicelli getting a job as an assistant director to the Hungarian film-maker Gustav Machatý, who was making a movie, Ballerine (1936), in Italy.

Monicelli had a long apprenticeship as scriptwriter and assistant director to, among others, Mario Camerini, Pietro Germi and Mario Soldati, before he got his first official directorial credits, shared with Stefano Vanzina (known as Steno), in 1949. Al Diavolo la Celebrità (A Night of Fame, 1949) starred Mischa Auer, the French boxer Marcel Cerdan and a famous tenor of the time, Ferruccio Tagliavini. There was a Frank Capra mood to the original story, which was written by the two co-directors, who then worked with other writers on the script.

In the same year, Monicelli and Steno made Totò Cerca Casa (Totò Looks for a Home), the first of a series of films they made starring the popular Neapolitan comic. The best of these was Guardie e Ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951), in which Totò was paired with Aldo Fabrizi. Monicelli was the sole director on Totò e Carolina (1955), which caused a political uproar in those years of rigid censorship because it made fun of a policeman. At first banned, it was released two years later in an edited version.

After directing the emerging comic star Alberto Sordi in a semi-dramatic role in Un Eroe dei Nostri Tempi (A Hero of Our Times, 1955), Monicelli began an ideal partnership with the scriptwriters Agenore Incrocci (known as Age) and Furio Scarpelli that was to last most of his career. They were co-authors, with Monicelli, of the original story and screenplay for I Soliti Ignoti. That film’s success established Monicelli as the father of a new school of comedy which reflected the social reality of the times – an Italian equivalent of the Ealing comedies. Among the film’s many attributes were the launching, in a small role, of Claudia Cardinale and the casting, in a comic part for the first time, of the dramatic Italian actor Vittorio Gassman, as a washed-up professional thief whose nondescript gang bungles a shabbily organised robbery.

Monicelli then had the intuition to pair Gassman with Sordi in La Grande Guerra (The Great War, 1959), produced by Dino De Laurentiis. They were cast as rascally, down-at-heel soldiers in the first world war who turn into reluctant heroes when they are captured by the Austrians. The ironic treatment of military traditions angered some, but audiences generally loved the film and it was the joint winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 1959.

Monicelli contributed to several of the fashionable compendium films made in the 1960s and 70s. One of the best was his contribution to Boccaccio 70 (1962), even if it was eclipsed by the more glamorous, starrier episodes directed by Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti. The producer Carlo Ponti understandably aroused Monicelli’s resentment by tactlessly leaving out his segment when the film was given a gala presentation at Cannes.

In 1963 Monicelli made what many would consider his masterpiece, I Compagni (Comrades), from another brilliant screenplay written with Age and Scarpelli. The film starred Marcello Mastroianni as a disarmingly grotesque political agitator leading workers into an unsuccessful but morally edifying strike in the Turin of the 1890s. It won critical plaudits and an Oscar nomination for its screenplay but the film was not a box-office success. Monicelli received another Oscar nomination for the screenplay for Casanova 70 (1965), with Mastroianni as his leading man once more.

Monicelli then had one hit after another, beginning with L’Armata Brancaleone (The Brancaleone Brigade, 1966), in which Gassman’s extrovert medieval knight leads a Falstaffian band of ruffians. The masterly use of bawdy language, stunning cinematography by Carlo Di Palma, set design by Piero Gherardi, and a lively musical score by Carlo Rustichelli made this one of Monicelli’s most popular films. An equally successful sequel followed. La Ragazza Con la Pistola (The Girl With the Gun, 1968), starring Monica Vitti, was another success but could have had more international appeal if the script had made wittier use of the babel that results when a Sicilian girl is submerged in Swinging 60s London.

In 1973, in Vogliamo i Colonnelli (We Want the Colonels) Monicelli succeeded in parodying an Italian coup d’etat. He scored another box-office triumph with Amici Miei (My Pals, 1975), a film that Germi had been preparing before he died. The broad humour of Monicelli’s treatment of this story of middle-aged practical jokers on the loose was to inspire a whole new genre of somewhat vulgar Italian comedies by less talented directors.

He directed literary adaptations including Caro Michele (Dear Michele, 1976) – based on Natalia Ginzburg’s novel – which won him the Silver Berlin Bear at the Berlin film festival. His 1977 adaptation of Vincenzo Cerami’s novel Un Borghese Piccolo Piccolo (An Average Little Man) gave Sordi another opportunity to confirm his dramatic mettle, this time in a despairing story of a middle-class Italian’s Death Wish vengeance. Le Due Vite di Mattia Pascal (The Two Lives of Mattia Pascal, 1985), starring Mastroianni, was based on a novella by Luigi Pirandello.

Monicelli remained prolific after his 70th birthday, directing one of his best later films, Speriamo che sia Femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl, 1986), a story of feminist solidarity in a radiant Tuscan setting. In 1991 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Venice film festival. After the dismal fiasco of Rossini! Rossini! (1991), an expensive, state-produced TV miniseries based on the life of the composer, he made several more piquant tragicomic films set among the Italian bourgeoisie which, he once admitted “is the subject which we film directors, being bourgeois ourselves, know most about”.

He had been sceptical about the new generation of Italian comedian-auteurs such as Nanni Moretti and Roberto Benigni, but began to feel more kindly towards them when they turned their irony against Berlusconi. Monicelli, who was always a leftist, thanked Berlusconi “for making me feel young again by joining in protests against he who has all the makings of a modern tyrant”. In 2006 he made his final feature, Le Rose del Deserto (The Roses of the Desert), a bitter comedy about the Italian army in Libya in 1940.

Monicelli, who was being treated for prostate cancer, is survived by two daughters, Ottavia and Martina, from his first marriage, and another daughter, Rosa, from his relationship with his last companion, Chiara Rapaccini.

• Mario Monicelli, film director, born 16 May 1915; died 29 November 2010